Exploring

First impressions didn't mean too much on Osqilon. When everyone was either caked in dirt or covered in soot from working the forges all day dressing up was the last thought on most anyone's mind. On Asnarth, it was a completely different story. How you looked when you first met someone set their interpretation for you for pretty much the rest of the time you knew each other. You were forever the man who walked in without pants or the girl whose clothes didn't fit right. Dillinger much preferred Osqilion's attitude towards the subject. It provided a certain range of freedom and comfort that he just couldn't argue with. Where as most of his new neighbors and coworkers were dressed to impress he most certainly was not. Garbed in oil stained jeans riddled with holes, a tee shirt that had seen better days, and a pair of square toed engineer boots. About the only part of him that looked presentable was the new plaid jacket he'd brought along. He'd suffered through meeting the new residents of the new planet and made a deft exit once he spotted his first opening. He could already tell that things were going to be interesting.He made a beeline towards the forest in order to seek a bit of solitude and some time to mull over how things were going to play out. 


Dillinger was a natural with machines and metal. It was in his blood. Nature, on the other hand, was a different beast entirely. The man had grown up either surrounded by mountains or in a city. He'd never seen so many trees outside of a book before. Unlike the city where things were set out in a logical pattern the forest proved to be a snarl of brambles, trees, bushes, and animals. It only took the engineer about an hour to get sufficiently lost and several more to push his already precarious predicament into hopelessly lost. He'd resigned himself to waiting for help and picked a nice comfy spot under a massive, shady tree. With his fleece hood pulled over his features he'd fallen asleep, tired out from his "adventure." The sound of footsteps and crunch of branches had stirred him from his sleep. Peering out from behind the tree he spotted a woman in green. "You found me!" he chimed loudly, jumping to his feet and rounding the tree. "I didn't actually thing everyone would get everything organized so quickly and send out a search party for at least a few more hours. I was prepared to spend the whole night out here. Really glad I didn't though. I'm pretty sure something would've tried to eat me." Dillinger pulled back his hood, revealing his forest beaten features. Leaves clung to his beard and red marks covered his face were he'd run into low hanging branches. Despite that he grinned from ear to ear, relived at his good fortune.

Dillinger's expression darkened when he was informed that she had no idea what he was talking about. That meant that whoever his new roommates were hadn't yet noticed his disappearance. He let out an irritated sigh, running his fingers through his hair and removing a few of the stray leaves. That bit of information had made the meeting rather embarrassing. It had hardly been more than half a day since they shuttle had landed and dropped off the lot of young adults and children and here he was, already lost on the new planet. That hardly seemed to scream genius, it barely screamed competent. Sheepishly he rubbed the back of his neck. "Er, well, yeah actually. It was a bit too much being around all of those people and getting everything set up. So I took off as soon as I found out what dorm I was supposed to stay in." Dillinger had deposited his few belongings he had brought from home on one of the four bunks in the dorm and then deftly exited the settlement. It was pretty easy actually. Everyone was so focused on getting to know each other and getting things properly sorted that they paid almost no attention to a lone straggler. Evidently they didn't notice that two had vanished. He wondered how many more people had left the gathering early. "Why're you out here?"  he found himself asking. He prayed that she wasn't as lost as he was. If she was at least he would have some company and they would've had to eventually notice two people missing. He was too hesitant to ask if she was just as clueless as he was. 

Magnificent? Dillinger took a step back to examine the tree that stood before them. It was tall alright, but it wasn't as if there weren't buildings bigger than it back on Asnarth. Hell, Dillinger and his mother's quarters had dwarfed the tree. It was hard for the man to see anything magnificent about it. To him it was just a hunk of lumber. Now, that monorail that she had mentioned. That might be something magnificent to see. When the girl mentioned that she had wanted to climb the behemoth of a tree, but didn't because of her dress Dillinger covered his mouth, trying to stifle a chuckle as best as he could, but there was no stopping it. "I can't rightly say that I've ever seen one like it. I haven't seen too many to compare it to though. There aren't too many trees from where I came from. And that's a shame that you can't climb it. It isn't like the tree's likely to go anywhere though and from how that meeting was going it seems like were going to be here for a long while." Her offer to take him to the monorail station was too kind. The fact that he was so close to it and hadn't been able to find it made him feel a bit inept. Maybe he should have climbed a tree to try and get some sense of bearing. It couldn't have been any harder than climbing a mountain or scaling a fence. "Please," he replied, "Else I'm probably gonna wander around this place until they actually do send out a search party."

He was surprised when the girl grabbed him by the hand. By most accounts Dillinger didn't really have what most people referred to as a personal bubble. Personal contact, no matter how intimate, particularly disturbed him and he often had a bad habit of invading other's imaginary bubble. Finding someone else who seemed to lack that understanding, or just didn't care, was a bit unusual. From what he could tell this girl was very unusual, at least, to his standards. "Reed," the older man began, "Reed Dillinger, but I hate my first name so mostly everyone calls me Dillinger, including my folks." It wasn't so much the sound of his first name that Dillinger despised so much as it was the meaning of it. A thin, hollow stick, flexible, yet brittle. It didn't sound like him in the slightest. He was made of sterner stuff. More adamant, much more like the metals he worked with rather than some plant that grew in the marsh. Plus, after a bit of digging he found out that there had been a famous outlaw named Dillinger centuries ago. He wasn't an outlaw, but it was certainly cooler than being named after a weed. 

Wren... So that was the name of his savior. It was nice to not just think of her as the girl. "It's nice to meet you, Wren. I wish it could have been under better circumstances. I usually don't end up hopelessly lost on new planets too often. " He was amazed that she had kept her bearing after entering the forest. This had to have been her first time, just like his. Yet here she was in just about the heart of it and she could already tell him where the Monorail was and probably how to get back to the settlement.

"That, I'm afraid, is a matter of semantics. If you mean by what I am on paper the people who put this whole soiree together categorized me as an Engineer, tasked with helping to perfect our new planet without repeating the mistakes of inventors past. If you were to ask my folks they'd probably tell you that I'm here to bring technological advancement, create the next big thing. If you're asking for my meaning, it's a bit simpler," he said, giving a slight shrug of his shoulders. "I'm here to make things and keep them running. Nothing fancy. You're welcome to try though. It's fun, at least I think it is. The smell of ink on blue prints and oil, the heat of the forge, the feeling of cold metal, seeing the finished product. It's fulfilling, starting with nothing but a few scraps of metal and plastic and ending with something entirely different." As he spoke his grim features brightened and he cracked an honest smile. He loved what he did in a manner similar to how Wren seemed to love the forest.

 Dillinger really wasn't too thrilled about being shipped off. He had actually thought to refuse the offer, but when he talked to his mother about it she encouraged him. He'd be fulfilling his civic duty and bettering humankind as a whole. Now that he was actually on the planet he was starting to have some doubts and getting lost within the first couple of hours was certainly making home seem like the place he was meant to be. "I've spent most of my life either in concrete jungles, mines, at a desk, or stuck behind a forge. What trees we had back on Asnarth were nothing compared to this and on Osqilon I practically lived in the mountains, far from the treeline." Dillinger thought back to what he had seen of trees. On Osqilon there were some, but they were used to fuel fires and constantly in a flux of being chopped to bits and replanted. Still, there weren't many to begin with. On Asnarth they were little more than decoration. He wasn't even sure if any of them were real once he thought back on it. He looked up at the trees towering above him and made a Venn diagram in his mind, categorizing similarities and differences.